&
love is this
This year did not work. Next year will — must, I’ve decided. The outstanding task: to resensitize my self to extremities of all kinds. Pornography, even and especially “vanilla” must shock and enrapture the nervous system whole. Staying up past twelve should register as delerium. Eating beyond the point of hunger, relished as precisely the sin it is. The mere sight of a screen should scandalize. And all my joints are to be left alone, incl. the distal interphalangeals I’ve cracked daily ever since I was, what, 19, when J– pinned me to the bed and beared down on them until they gave?
At the same time, what now constitutes event must become so commonplace that it no longer registers as: leaving the apt., reading whorishly; taking garish sums of images; touching and being touched; doing what I dread the moment the dread sets in; walking daily and nightly; writing; sharing my writing with others despite hating it; declaring what I want because it’s the only way to get it: a solo exhibition, a job that doesn’t siphon all my creative energies away, to get well and truly out of this country, to get out of this country without being searched or surveilled or exposed to potentially disabling viruses, to live mainly on fruit and men and the generosity of grants, to know the feeling of all birds at the same time (love is this), my mom to live forever. And I should live along a sizable body of water and have it infect me with dreams, dreams of that feeling of those birds being everyone’s, dreams that would put me on the No Fly List if the TSC were to intercept them which it can’t because the dreaming is the flying, and I want those birds to fly everywhere but especially over Palestine and Congo and Sudan, and El Salvador and Ethiopia and the Everglades and and and, and I want to murder my sorry tendency toward polysyndeton, to disarticulate the ampersandic joints that fuse all the places and birds and dreams together and I want my mom to live forever with all those murders, of all those birds. Up there, see?